It was a year of big change – in many ways – for Calgary, and the city’s Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), David Duckworth, looked back on its impact on city staff.
Duckworth sat down with LWC just before Christmas in a one-on-one to talk about some of the challenges, while highlighting the successes of 2025.
The CAO position is the sole employee of Calgary city council, the one person responsible for executing its direction. The CAO is responsible for the day-to-day functions and services provided to citizens.
In the execution of those duties in 2025, Duckworth said that the one thing that sticks out in his mind when looking back at the year was Calgary’s municipal election.
“With political parties being first time in our political landscape here, both in Edmonton and Calgary, we spent a year preparing for the election and to orientate [sic] a new council. I was pretty confident that we’d have a fairly big turnover in the number of new councillors on council,” he said.
“The election, including going from using tabulators to ballot base again, there was a lot of time and effort spent to make sure we could run a really a successful election.”
Duckworth also talked about the billions in infrastructure work going on in Calgary right now: the Scotia Place, the Green Line, Arts Commons Transformation, downtown office conversions and ongoing water infrastructure rehabilitation.
One thing that 2025 lacked, however, was major surprises, Duckworth said.
“If I was to really think every year, there’s always surprises. There’s things that you really don’t anticipate,” he said.
“2025, by and large, I wouldn’t say there were any really big surprises, but because we were preparing for the election and still coming out of the pandemic and still catching up on certain things, I would say 2025 was less about surprises and more about really focusing on what we were trying to do for Calgarians.”
The council turnover
On Oct. 20, Calgary voters elected 10 new city council members, including a new mayor, Jeromy Farkas. While only a handful of incumbents were running, it still meant a lot of new faces would be around the council horseshoe.
Duckworth said preparation for that turnover was key in responding to a new direction. They spent the year prior trying to understand what Calgarians would be talking about on the campaign trail; affordability, public safety, housing, and infrastructure were the top items.
With 10 new faces on council, and a mandate that was decidedly different than the last Calgary city council, Duckworth said they knew changes were coming.
“My team and I worked really hard to just make sure that we have a really nimble, agile organization so that we can pivot,” he said.
“At the end of the day, my job is to make sure that the administration of the city takes council’s direction, whatever that could be, and we implement it. We don’t control council. We take their direction.”
One of those pivots was on citywide rezoning. While it wasn’t a surprise to city admin that a new city council could come in with a mandate to once again revise Calgary’s Land-Use Bylaw, removing citywide rezoning, it does come with a lot of extra work.
Duckworth said that while there were 98 housing recommendations laid out in their strategy, and citywide rezoning was only one of them, he said it was one that required the most significant amount of work.
“It required a significant amount of effort. It was costly to have public hearings, to have town halls, to have staff working on this,” he said.
“To undo it – the undoing is probably a little bit easier, but it’s the undoing…and then what?”
He said Calgary’s made big strides in adding more homes, and the city has been doing what it can to play a role in bringing home prices and rents down.
“We’ve done so well, but we need to continue that work. Long story short, it required a ton of effort, and it will continue to require a lot of effort from city staff,” Duckworth said.
“But I don’t just mean city staff, council takes a lot of their time and effort, but I really do hope Calgarians also take a lot of time and effort to continue to be engaged, to continue to be informed, ask lots of questions.”
CAO pay and the Mayor’s desire for a ‘performance culture’
When asked why the pay of city council’s only employee, the CAO, was tucked into city budget documents in fine print, and only a pay band was released with the City of Calgary’s disclosure summary, Duckworth said that how it’s disclosed isn’t up to him.
The discussion happens in a closed session of council and then they decide what’s disclosed publicly and when.
He said Calgary’s CAO pay has been disclosed for a very long time, put into the annual financial documents published in March or April. Duckworth said, however, moving forward, they will be including the CAO’s exact salary on the city’s annual compensation disclosure. His will be the only position with a precise salary, while all other positions will have only a pay band.
“Let me say this. I am all about being as open and transparent, personally, but also our organization,” Duckworth said.
“It’s so important that Calgarians clearly understand where their tax dollars and user fees dollars go, what they’re being used for, which includes salaries.”
That said, Duckworth noted that in other jurisdictions where a true sunshine list is published, with employee names and exact salaries, it drives labour costs up because employees know what each other makes. He said it pushes employees to ensure they’re no longer on the lower end of the pay scale.
Along with that pay, however, comes performance.
In LWC’s year-end interview with Mayor Jeromy Farkas, the mayor said that one of his biggest challenges thus far was reforming city hall and making it more responsive to Calgarians.
He said that he wanted to “drive a performance culture with city administration.”
Duckworth said that he looked forward to working with the current council to determine exactly what they want from him and his team.
“What I believe Mayor Farkas is talking about is this council wants to determine what those metrics and performance metrics are going to be to ensure that they can hold me and my team accountable. And I totally look forward to that discussion, because that’s exactly what it should be,” he said.
“It should be more black and white, so I know if I’m hitting the mark or not, and when I’m not, I need to be able to have a good justification why I haven’t and my team haven’t been able to achieve it, and also ability to say we’ve achieved and we should celebrate that success.”
Looking ahead to 2026
At the top of CAO Duckworth’s 2026 to-do list is working with the new city council to develop its next four-year plan, including the budget.
To a certain degree, he said he assumed top priorities would remain public safety, infrastructure, and housing. Duckworth said they’ll need to nail that down ahead of the 2026 budget deliberations.
It’s a challenging balancing act, particularly when citizens want investment but are focused on affordability.
“Nobody likes to increase user fees or have their property taxes go up, and so that will be a constant challenge about how much do they need to go up to make sure we’re delivering all the services that Calgarians are expecting,” he said.
“That will be a huge challenge.”
It’s one that Duckworth said city administration is geared up for.
One of his personal goals, aside from building an organization that people want to work for, is to make Calgary the benchmark for success in all available municipal metrics.
“I know my staff are just so dedicated, and it’s just so professional, and I’m so proud of everyone that I work with here at the city. Like I said, already, my staff want the exact same thing that this council wants, the exact same thing that Calgarians want,” he said.
“We’re building a world class city, a place where it’s the best place to live, work and play. Our services are great services, and they’re super affordable. A city that’s safe and welcoming. We all want the same thing, and I just want, if anything, just to know that for Calgarians, their public service, the staff that work at the city, are top notch.”
